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Following is the Sample Welcome Speech for Freshers joined in school or college. You are welcome to use it 🙂

Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Afternoon and welcome to the so and so school of management,

It is both an honor and a privilege to stand before you, specially the new comers, today and welcome you to this amazing institution. I would like to raise a toast to all the new faces in here. New faces that we don’t know till now but would wish to know. The same new faces that once belonged to us an year ago. The same new faces that, over ashort period of time, will no more be, ‘NEW’ faces.

Well, I speak on behalf of all the second year students here. Just a few lines of how we all feel at this juncture. Here I go.

Newness or novelty has been intriguing and fascinating to man since the Neanderthal times. Novelty for us is excitement and exuberance, surprise and science, cheerfulness and joy, hope and happiness, boldness and buoyancy, positive ness and passion. But men as we all are, novelty to us also means risk, unfamiliarity, uncertainty, fear, doubt and disturbance.

In the same token, the old and the established stands for ‘the familiar and comfortable’, ‘knowledgeable and therefore able’, ‘mature and therefore trustworthy’,‘rugged and therefore reliable.’ But all this goes with accusations of ‘stagnation and staleness’,‘out-of-date and outmoded ness’ and ‘the slow and the stumped’.

What I wish to express using all the ‘adjectives’ that I used is that these new faces in here, our juniors for the coming year, represent to us the same hope and challenge as new players in a cricket team or new twists in a good story. And we, as seniors,should ideally be the matured bunch, a bunch of guys and gals they could trust and depend upon.

Together, we can make a terrific team. So, I, on behalf of all the ‘old’ faces here, welcome the new faces with open hands, open minds and above all, OPEN HEARTS.

Artoon Solutions is happy to announce that it has released two more Android applications: MyUNO (Lite and HD) and Kids Numbers (Lite and HD).

MyUNO is varient of well-known UNO game. The Lite version includes limited time of play with the first level of the game and there are limited opposite characters to play with. There is only single type of character with limited powers you would play with. You can get the lite (free) version here : https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.artoon.MYUNOLite

MyUNO HD version has full version. It includes 12 different virtual players with different power cards. You will play with 3 different players at a time in each level. You will have all power cards to defend those players. It is a lot of fun to play this game. You can get it from here : https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.artoon.MYUNO

Here I would like to discuss the FMS, Live Streaming and Sync issues between publisher and subscribers. Also I would discuss about possible solutions 🙂

The problem: Let’s say we are publishing a live stream using FMLE (Flash Media Live Encoder) or our custom publisher to FMS (Flash Media Server). There are 5 subscribers who are watching this live stream (given that those subscribers connected to stream after the stream has been already published). Now NetStream.time will not give absolute stream time for any of the subscriber connected to live stream because it gives time since the playback of live stream is started by subscriber. Now let’s say I (as a publisher) want to take certain action (such as displaying an image, or some message, or slide) on subscribers on specific point of time (in terms of viewing the live stream). Let’s say from publisher side, when I see (or speak) something (a tortoise in scene!) on screen, I want to show another picture of that same thing to all subscribers (dancing tortoises!) exactly at the same time when each one of them see tortoise on their live stream.

SharedObject can not be used because that will not provide any kind of sync (in terms of live streaming) because they are asynchronous and live streams may get delayed due to slow bandwidths on subscribers.

Even we can not directly call a function on FMS which would in turn call functions to all subscribers because that process would be instantaneous (compared to delay in live stream) and if there are number of subscribers this process may hang FMS (and publisher) application for a fraction of second.

The Solutions:

1) Somehow give all subscribers the absolute stream time. This would be an ideal solution but not easy. From FMLE, I managed to find a solutions and that is timecode. Let’s say if the publishing video frame rate is 15 fps then FMLE would encode a keyframe at each group of 15 frames (given that timecode interval is same as frame rate of video). Now the timecode is embedded as system time and date which we need to take care of. The condition here is the video must be recorded on server so that we can know the start time of publishing. On subscribers we get onFI() event at each 1 second which would give you current date and time. From this current time subtract the initial time (which is found by playing recorded stream) and that would give you absolute live stream time 🙂

2) Another way is kind of events instead of focusing on time but yet it keeps solid track of sync. From publisher side, call NetStream.send() function along with necessary parameters. This will actually embed metadata on current frame being encoded. When subscribers get this frame, they get the embedded event and they can take the necessary action by analyzing the data given in that event. Usually I would prefer to use onMetaData event for this stuff 🙂

Phue! It’s been late night now (1:43 AM already) and I am going for sleep now. If any one have any questions, post me a comment and I will be back there right away 🙂

I have bad experience with above 3 at the same time. When ever you use an array in FMS side coding and pass along that in Remote SharedObject you would be in trouble in in terms of bandwidth and memory usage of application. When I change anything an array i.e. add an item, update an item or delete an item, you would need to pass the whole array to shared object and that will send the full array to all connected clients to that shared object. So even if you have change single item in the full array it eats the bandwidth for full array.

So, what I learnt for it? NEVER use an array in FMS side coding when you have to pass it to Shared Object. Always use property names of shared object to identify the objects inside the shared object.

I am very excited to tell you guys that in previous week we launched a simple kids application free for android touch devices. The application name is “Kidz Touch and Learn” where the kids can touch the screen and it would display different Alphabets and Numbers (between 1 to 100). The application changes its background time to time to give different visualizations. Even kid can change the background at any time by shaking the device.

The application has been downloaded for 49 times in this week and that’s incredible for this simple application! You can give a try here. More details could be found here. We are hoping to release more cool applications in upcoming days 🙂

Think of a live stream is being published to FMS and all subscribers are watching that live stream. Now one of the subscriber is late in joining this live stream but still he does that successfully and watches the live stream from the point when he joined it. Everything looks perfect!

But wait, one thing is not perfect definitely – the time of the stream been published. Yes, the subscribers does not see the absolute stream time from start of its publish. So what does that mean? They are not in sync of each other. Let’s say I want to notify all subscribers at certain point of time in video. Now I would be watching something at time t and I will send message to all subscribers. What I want is : all subscribers should see this message at exact point of time when they see what I am watching in video. But as there is no time sync, subscribers won’t know that at what point of time the message should be displayed.

As work around, what I did is I passed timecode from FMLE. That means that at each frame of video, FMLE would encode system time in the frame. All subscribers would get onFI() event with that time code at each second (given that the timecode rate and frame rate of video is same at FMLE). A subscriber would have to save the first timecode as the start point of time. On next onFI() event they can just subtract the start timecode from the current timecode and that would give it a absolute time of stream!!

Once absolute time of stream is found, you can synchronize the message around 🙂 I did not written down any code here but if any one wants the code, let me know – I can provide it.

It seems like Firefox 4 is having problem with Flash Player 10.2 (may be older versions as well). For any content in Flash Player where you set to use hand cursor for buttons, movieclips etc., Firefox does not show hand cursor for those items. I just experienced this issue on my mac.

Let’s say you want to create a snapshot of a movieclip inside your Flash/Flex application. The constraint here is you need to resize the snapshot to the values (width and height) entered by user. Here is how you could do this :

var bitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(clip.width, clip.height); //clip is a movieclip whose snapshot is to be taken
bitmapData.draw(clip);

var bitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmapData.clone());
bitmap.width = int(width); //rounding width and height to integer values
bitmap.height = int(height); //This is important to resize the child (bitmap) here as you can not resize the sprite (sp) itself as sprite is going to be drawn inside bitmap data.
var sp:Sprite = new Sprite();
sp.addChild(bitmap);

var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(sp.width, sp.height); //As the child of sprite is already resized it will think that actual width and height of sprite are unscaled and hence it can map pixel to pixel on full width and height.
bmd.draw(sp); //now draw sprite over bitmap data.

That’s it. Again keep in mind that the clip which you are going to draw over bitmap data should not be resized because that will not affect the drawing of bitmap data and you could see some unusual results.

There may be other ways to achieve this 🙂 but I found (may be others found before me) this method convenient for me.